Insights and attitude about PR, journalism and traditional and social media.

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Birnbach Communications Issues Five Media Predictions for 2019

For the 17th year, here are our top media, social media and marketing predictions for 2019. It is a disruptive time for the media, bringing both chaos and opportunities.Without further ado, here are five of the agency’s top 5
media trends for 2019:

1.The growing
number of streaming content services make consumers harder to reach. The number of people who stream content as well as the
number of apps providing on-demand contentis rapidly growing.Already 61
percent of Americans, age 18 to 29, regularly watch or listen to
what they want, where and when they want it, according to Pew Research. Apps
for CBS, TBS, NBC and ABC are ad supported – only by national brands – but more
dominant services including Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Go, Hulu Plus, YouTube
Red, and Spotify Premium are ad-free, putting their subscribers out of reach
for marketers.

2.The age of the
mass media is mostly over. It’s a niche
world now. Partly that’s because marketers can now reach very specific
audiences, along with nanoinfluencers,
since online media can tailor content by gender, age, interest, political
persuasion, etc. (Unfortunately, print media also is increasingly becoming
niche, due to an ongoing reduction of the number of pages and size of their
news staff combined with an increase in subscription rate.) In 2019, it’s complicated
and expensive to reach a broad audience so marketers need to consider targeting
key audiences through niche media.

4.Social media will continue to undergo scrutiny and it won’t
look good. And despite that, people still won’t
quit Facebook, Twitter, etc. amid growing concerns about privacy and disinformation
campaigns. We expect Congress and the EU, the UK and other governments to look
to regulate social media. But we also expect that most won’t be able to
regulate effectively because most politicians don’t have a firm grasp of how
social media works. There will be more hearings but not many solutions because
it’s a complex issue that algorithms alone can’t solve.

In addition to these media
predictions, we will roll out additional trends focusing on
technology, fintech, artificial intelligence, retailapoclypse, the labor
shortage and gig economy, and other topics here on our blog at blog.birnbachcom.com.

Please let us know what you like or disagree with. We'd love to hear from you. As usual, next November, we will evaluate how we did with this year's predictions.